A financial company typically mails statements to its credit card members or banking customers on a monthly basis. The financial company may also frequently mail credit cards or banking cards to the customers for re-issues or replacements. In addition, the company may occasionally send letters to current or potential customers for various purposes. Millions of mail pieces are produced and delivered every month for these purposes. Though a costly process, mailing of the statements, cards and letters creates a valuable opportunity for the company and its partners to promote products and services to the customers. These mail pieces are usually guaranteed to reach a large number of families or individuals and are much more likely to receive attention than other types of mass mailings. Companies have long been taking advantage of this communication channel by including advertisements and solicitations in the outgoing statements or letters. These advertisements or solicitations or the like (hereinafter collectively referred to as “offers”) may take the form of a message, an insert, a billhead, a convenience check, an inner envelope or an outer envelope, for example. An offer typically describes a specific promotional program (e.g., one related to a financial or insurance product) that is offered by a business entity and is usually targeted at a specific group of customers.
It is a demanding task to manage offers and to incorporate them into outgoing mail pieces. For any given month, a large financial company may typically target hundreds of offers at millions of customers based on complex business rules. These offers need to be properly created together with associated rules, matched to appropriate accounts, produced on a variety of paper stocks, and inserted into outgoing mail pieces. This same or similar process is typically repeated several times (“cycles”) each month. The large volumes of mail pieces require considerable investment of resources, the successful return of which depends heavily on the accuracy, efficiency and consistency in the offer management process.
A number of solutions exist for targeting various offers at a large number of accounts or portfolios. However, they typically fail to provide an algorithm that can consistently match the actual number of offer insertions with the requested volume for each offer. As a result, “over-targeting” and “under-targeting” of offers can occur, wherein high-priority offers are targeted to too many customers while low-priority offers reach very few customers. One example of such problem is illustrated in FIG. 1 wherein there are six offer items (Offer Item 1-6) for targeting at various customer groups (Group 1-Group 10). The customer groups listed in each bracket are those that are qualified to receive the corresponding offer item. Note that only Group1 is qualified for Offer Item 6. If each group may receive a maximum of five offers and the offer items are assigned in the order of their item numbers, Offer Item 6, being the last offer assigned, will not be assigned to any group at all. By the time Offer Item 6 is processed, Group1 will already have been assigned five offers and there is no space left for Offer Item 6. This is just one scenario of under-targeting for low-priority offers.
Other problems and drawbacks also exist.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide a solution for offer targeting which overcomes the above-described deficiencies and shortcomings.